Sunday, April 30, 2006

You already ordered your CD, right? And made an even small donation? Be sure to buy a shirt for extra padding for the CD case.

OpenBSD 3.9 has officially been released and is available for download. This is great news for me because not all precompiled packages are on the CDs. Release day means a wget to download the rest of the packages.

A couple weeks ago, I loaded Apple's Boot Camp to dual boot with Windows XP. It was neat. But I don't really care to run Windows on my Mac.

Now that Boot Camp is on my computer, though, I figured I could probably get OpenBSD installed. I tried installing from my OpenBSD 3.9 CD first. But it wouldn't boot past USB device scanning. I downloaded a a 3.9 snapshot from April 29, 2006, and OpenBSD installed. But...

Saturday, April 29, 2006

With tomorrow's (May 1) release of OpenBSD 3.9, informit.com offers an article in which "Open Source expert David Chisnall gives us the ins and outs of where OpenBSD has been, where it is now with the new version 3.9, and what lies ahead in the future." (link to article)

The article also brings a brief history of how OpenBSD came to exist, their fight for openness, their financial struggles and where OpenBSD is going.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

GoDaddy is a cheap registrar for Internet domain names. I use them at work and am planning to switch from Network Solutions for erdelynet.com at the end of the year. It's fantastic to see another company donate to the OpenBSD project (see my post about the Mozilla foundation).

Saturday, April 15, 2006

OS X has a very cool feature built into to its resolver: /etc/resolver. It allows you to specify different DNS servers for different domains. After creating the /etc/resolver directory, I can create a /etc/resolver/erdelynet.com file with "nameserver 192.168.25.10" in it. Now, my Mac will use 192.168.25.10 for resolving erdelynet.com and whatever my ISP assigned me for everythying else.

When is this useful? erdelynet.com runs a MySQL server. My firewall blocks attempts from the Internet to port 3306. But suppose I want to just run a MySQL admin tool from my PowerBook and don't want to mess around with SSH tunnels.

With OpenVPN & /etc/resolver/erdelynet.com, I can seemless move from external user to internal user with two clicks.

Tunnelblick is a very nice GUI for OpenVPN. A tunnel icon is added to the menu bar. You can click on the icon to connect/disconnect to your VPN.

The "stable" version (2.0.1) allows for connnecting to a single VPN. You create a ~/Library/openvpn directory and save your configuration file as openvpn.conf.

The 3.0 Release Candidate (I just now noticed that RC2 is out) allows for the ability to connect to multiple VPNs depending on the name of your configuration file. Save your configuration file as Server1.conf, Server2.conf (where "Server1" is an arbitrary string).

Firefox 1.5.0.2 was just released! This is especially great news for Intel Mac users. This is the first official release that's a Universal Binary (meaning that it will run on Intel and PowerMac machines natively).

Besides some bugfixes, there doesn't seem to be much else new besides being a universal binary.

This, I believe, is a great move for the Mozilla Foundation. The OpenBSD project releases some pretty fantastic code that the Mozilla Foundation admittedly uses. I personally use Firefox and Thunderbird on OpenBSD and on my two Macs. My wife uses Firefox on her Windows PCs at home and at work. I, as the "IT guy" for everyone I know, recommend Firefox to my friends, family and have made it the corporate standard at work.

We did it!. The University of Maryland Women's Basketball team defeated Duke in the 2006 Women's National Championship in one of the most exciting (men's, women's, pro) basketball games I've ever seen.

While in Mexico, Holly and I were able to convince the "Sports Bar" to show the game. We were the only ones in the room form all but the last minute of regulation and overtime. There were even people complaining that their Latin Dance class was starting late because we were watching the game. But, we were able to see the whole, exciting game!